Presidential debates go online

“The 2008 election is already shaping up to be the most cyber-savvy presidential contest in the brief history of the Web. Now three major Web sites — Yahoo Elections 2008, The Huffington Post, and Slate — have announced that they will collectively host two online-only debates, one for the announced Democratic candidates and one for Republicans.

The debates will allow the candidates to participate wherever they are located around the country. Each will appear on live video, and will be able to speak to and question the other candidates through the online connection.

The debate will also be uniquely interactive for the audience. Viewers will be able to submit both written and video questions in real-time, and can blog their responses to the candidates’ answers.

The idea of hosting a virtual presidential debate was the brainchild of conservative-turned-liberal-pundit Arianna Huffington, who saw the potential for an online forum while at the World Economic Forum in Davos. That event was covered by both traditional journalists and bloggers.” — Yahoo! News

So, I can be sitting in the Coffee Zone in beautiful downtown Jefferson City (slurping Rocket Fuel)… record a 30 second question and zap the the video clip to the debate site…and see my question (and candidate responses) 5 minutes later. Or, watch what hundreds (thousands?) of bloggers are saying, about what the candidates are saying, in real time. Okay, that’s only cool to bloggers.

I find most TV debates to be a waste of everyone’s time. But I might watch/take part in something like this.

Boomsday (Christopher Buckley)

“You loaded the software and typed in the search words. Say you’d been arrested for drunk driving or soliciting a prostitute, or you’d been in a gossip page biting the ear of some pretty young thing in a nightclub. Or, for that matter, you had been charged by the SEC with swindling your shareholders. You typed in your name, along with “drunk driving” or “prostitute” or “ear” or “embezzling.” Spider Repellent found all the references to you on the Web and – deleted them.”

“As the baby boomers shuffle into their sunset years, Uncle Sam will hand them a bundle of juicy tax breaks and assorted perks in return for agreeing to a painless lethal injection at age 65. Too draconian? Not to worry. A second option would give slightly less generous benefits to those who prefer to hang around to age 70.”

“I’d like to be in charge for just five minutes. Balance the books. Get us out of debt. Be nice to our friends, tell our enemies to fuck off. Clean up the air and the water. Throw corporate crooks in the clink. Put dignity back in government. Fix things.” — Randolph K. Jepperson

BADMAP is an acronym for Bio-Actuarial Dyna-Metric Age Predictor. It works like this:

” A person’s DNA profile, family history, mental history, lifestyle profile, every variable –how many trips to the grocery per week, how many airplane flights, hobbies, food, booze, number of times per month you had sex and with whom, everything down to what color socks you put on in the morning– were all fed into the software. RIP-ware would then calculate and predict how and when you’d die. In the testing, they had programmed it retroactively with the DNA and lifestyle profile of thousand of people who had already died. RIP-ware predicted their deaths with an accuracy of 99.07 percent. In a simulation, it predicted the death of Elvis Presley — just four months from the actual date of his demise. The ultimate “killer app.”

Insurance companies had been working on similar programs. What a windfall it would be for them if they could sell life insurance to someone they knew was going to live another forty years–and conversely decline life insurance to someone the computer predicted would be pushing up daisies within two years.

Another field of vast potential were the old folks’ homes. typically, these demanded that a prospective resident turn over his and her entire net worth in return for perpetual care. You could live two years or twenty years; that was their gamble. But if a nursing home knew,in advance, that John Q. smith was going to have a fatal heart attack in 2.3 years while watching an ad for toenail fungus ointment on the evening news, they would much rather have his nest egg as advance payment than that of, say, Jane Q. Jones, who RIP-ware predicted would live another twenty-five years and die at the ripe old age of 105.

“In cyberspace everyone can hear you scream”

Boomsday by Christopher Buckley

Life After Death

“A must read for everyone who will die.” That’s how one reviewer describes Deepak Chopra’s “Life After Death.” I ordered the book after seeing Dr. Chopra on The Colbert Report. The title pretty much describes the book which got a fair amount of highlighter (my measure of good non-fiction). Here’s one graf from page 239:

“In spiritual terms the cycle of birth and rebirth is a workshop for making creative leaps of the soul. The natural and the supernatural are not doing different things but are involved in transformation on separate levels. At the moment of death the ingredients of your old body and old identity disappear. Your DNA and everything it created devolve back to their simple component parts. Your memories dissolve back into raw information. None of this raw material is simply recombined to produced a slightly altered person. To produce a new body capable of making new memories, the person who emerges must be new. You do not acquire a new soul, because the soul doesn’t have content. It’s not “you” but the center around which “you” coalesces, time after time. It’s your zero point.”

I’ve never studied or researched reincarnation, but I’ve always had a curiosity about and openess to the idea. In 1988 I wrote:

“As I think about the idea of a past existence, I feel a fondness for this “earlier me”. A sense of gratitude for whatever spiritual progress he was able to achieve. At the same time, I feel a sense of anticipation or expectation for my “next life”. And some responsibility to that future self. I’d like to move him (or her?) along as far as I can on this “cosmic lap.” To move him closer to…a perfect consciousness? Nirvana?”

“Mixed in with all of that is a sense of relief that I don’t have to complete everything in this lifetime. This is not the only shot I’ll get. And this awareness is vital because we all know –consciously or subconsciously– that we won’t “get it all done” in a spiritual sense. We hope (and work) for progress but a single” lifetime seems hopelessly short.”

Upon rereading the full post, I’m struck by how close I got (to Dr. Chopra’s explanation), given my complete ignorance.

I confess I could never stretch my common sense and logic (and faith?) around many of the stories in the Bible. And my recent read of Richard Dawkins’ case for atheism (The God Delusion) didn’t convince me. But I really enjoyed Life After Death and will read more by Dr. Chopra.

Nearly half our lives spent with TV, radio Internet and newspapers

Adults and teens will spend nearly five months (3,518 hours) next year watching television, surfing the Internet, reading daily newspapers and listening to personal music devices. That’s only one of thousands of nuggets of information on Americana and the world in the U.S. Census Bureau’s Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2007.

According to projections from a communications industry forecast, people will spend 65 days in front of the TV, 41 days listening to radio and a little over a week on the Internet in 2007. Adults will spend about a week reading a daily newspaper and teens and adults will spend another week listening to recorded music. Consumer spending for media is forecasted to be $936.75 per person. (U.S. Census Bureau News)

Internet access in your car

It’s early days but it is here. And Mark Ramsey looks (not so very far) ahead at what it means for radio stations:

“In the world of mobile radio, our distribution is currently both universal and exclusive. But when “the box” belongs to a third party, we are assured of neither easy distribution nor universal access. The “box owners” will do what Apple does with iTunes: Yes, anyone can post a podcast. But a very few are “featured” while most are not. The “filters” control the value. And in this scenario you and I are no longer the filters.”

I think it’s just very hard for most radio folks to believe that their listeners would listen to another station if they could. If a market has three radio stations, one might be pop…another country…and one doing news/talk. The listening pie is nicely divided, everybody gets a pretty good slice.

When all cars have high-speed net access (and they will), your station won’t be one of a hand full of listening options, it will be one of hundreds.

Newsroom New Year’s resolutions for 2007

A few nuggets from Lost Remote Managing Editor Steve Safran’s Newsroom New Year’s resolutions for 2007:

Start thinking of the web as more than our newscast online
Your website is a new channel, not just a new way of repurposing your news. If you were magically given a new TV channel, you wouldn’t populate it with your newscast over and over, would you? So why are you doing that online? … Think of the website as a new channel instead of a news site.

Integrate blogging into our newsroom
I know, change is painful. It’s additional work, yes. Not a ton, but some. Get over it. Workflows change.

Prepare my site for the 2008 elections
Now’s your chance. There will be a lot of money going into online advertising for the election. And you can get it. But only if you can make a compelling case that your site deserves it.

Never allow the words “added value” in my shop again
As long as you are training your advertisers that the web is added value, you are telling them it is NO value.

Existing newsies need to know the painful truth: we have to work on more platforms as part of our jobs now. If we don’t want to, that’s fine. Younger people who will work for less will be graduating this June. And next June. And the following June…

I started flogging this mule almost ten years ago. And I couldn’t fill a teacup with the progress I’ve made. But then, June is just around the corner.

Will your radio station be in every Ford?

Ford Motor Company and Microsoft are expected to announce new “Windows Automotive” software called “Sync,” that will make it possible (easier?) to make hands-free cell phone calls and download music or receive email.

Chicken Little“If you can use your car to download music, you can also use it to stream music. And if you can stream music then you can do so from any number of music providers, not just your radio station.”

“What is YOUR group doing to be in front of this trend? What is YOUR group doing to be in every car in every way in 2007 and beyond? What content do you have that every Ford will want to stream?” — Mark Ramsey at Hear 2.0

If I were still a radio station program director, I might grab a program schedule and go through the day asking that question about each programming element. I think there will be lots of stuff folks in my local market will want to hear (news, weather, sports, etc) but they won’t want to make an appointment to listen to it. They’ll want to have it automatically downloaded to their cars so they can hear it when they want it. Podcasts.

Blog Wars

I stumbled across this a couple of nights ago while mindlessly surfing the cable channels. A fascinating documentary on the Sundance Channel. In Blog Wars, filmmakers James Rogan and Phil Craig examine how online democratic activism is shaping important elections by focusing on the decisive Connecticut senate race and Ned Lamont’s challenge to incumbent Joe Lieberman.

“You can’t Swift-Boat Moqtada Al-Sadr”

From a blog post titled “Iran’s Smackdown on Dubya,” by Matt Taibbi:

“And we also now can say for sure that the famed cold-blooded ruthlessness of the Bush-Rove-Cheney crew has been proven to be a crock. Those guys are ruthless when it comes to winning American elections. But when it comes to war and diplomacy, they’re a bunch of kittens. You can’t Swift-Boat Moqtada Al-Sadr. When it comes to real enemies, our leaders are useless.”

Taibbi also writes a column (“Road Rage”) for Rolling Stone. In the December 14, 2006 issue, he writes about John Ashcroft’s recent appearance at the Department of Justice for the unveiling of a new portrait of himself.

“Ashcroft sat beneath the infamous “Spirit of Justice” statue –the great lady with the naked stone tit that the religious nutcase Ashcroft once ordered clothed. Now she was unclothed again, her big boob-cone honking at the audience of tight-assed law enforcement officials, and Ashcroft could do nothing but sit under it with a nervous smile on his face.”

If you wonder “who cares?… you’re not alone. Taibbi was the only reporter there.